A grizzly bear’s wild journey through trials and tribulations in the Bow Valley has become more accessible through an immersive virtual reality web experience.
The National Film Board (NFB) has made its interactive documentary Bear 71 free on Google Chrome under the title Bear 71 VR, which enables those interested to re-live the female grizzly’s point of view existence, online.
“This new collaboration with Google is part of the NFB’s strategic goal of forging partnerships with global leaders in creation and innovation to explore new forms of digital storytelling and engage audiences everywhere in immersive experiences that break new ground in form and content,” said Claude Joli-Coeur, Government Film Commissioner and NFB Chairperson.
Developed using a user-friendly and open platform WebVR technology, Bear 71 VR, meaning virtual reality, is available using a Daydream-ready phone such as Pixel or Daydream View, and can also be viewed as a 2D interactive experience.
The VR was developed using data and photography of the female grizzly, better known as Bear 71, when she was monitored from 2001-09 by park wardens during her 11 years in the park before she was struck and killed on the railway.
The original doc Bear 71, which launched in 2012, showed how humans coexist with wildlife in the modern world and technology. The doc was created by the NFB, local conversationalist and filmmaker Leanne Allison, and Vancouver’s Jeremy Mendes.
Mendes has been creating digital media content for 20 years and said VR brings another element to the table.
“Leanne approached the film board with all the trail camera photos, of being monitored, and was going to try to do something with digital media with it,” said Mendes.
“The first thing I noticed when I started looking at the nuts and bolts going on was just with how this information was collected, like being watched by surveillance, it struck as me interesting and this was technology’s view of wildlife, and what wild is.”
The documentary highlights the bear’s struggle living in a national park, which can be related to the recent troubled Bow Valley wolf pack’s misfortunes of human encounters and unnatural death.
The bear, despite efforts to program it to stay away from humans, is still a wild animal.
“The narrative is really a driving force and that was the saving grace ... I think it was a storytelling tool in some way, essentially putting you inside the view of the animal,” said Mendes.
“You see a lot of intersections of what it’s trying to figure out in road crossings and getting food – the bear still has to be a bear in all that.”
